On Appadurai’s “Ethnoscapes”

I’m a little unclear regarding Appadurai’s views on the relationship between literary studies and culture. On one hand he seems to celebrate what he perceives as a move beyond “the era of ‘blurred genres,’” yet at the same time he laments what he considers the “hijack[ing] of culture by literary studies” (52-53). Perhaps I’m seeing a binary where it doesn’t exist, in fact, upon a second, closer reading, he seems to see an important relationship between “the word and the world.” Still, “hijack” strikes me as a pejorative term.

Appadurai’s reference to the Enlightenment is especially interesting as recently I have been grappling with the implications of self-determinism and agency. As revolutionary as these ideas were in the eighteenth century, freeing individuals from the assumed limitations of birth and class, today that same sense of agency has been turned back on the individual. Where once the message was a hopeful “You can do anything,” it has “progressed”/evolved/devolved into today’s “You must do everything.” As Appaduai points out, communication technologies have contributed to this situation by expanding the imagined possibilities for individuals far beyond their geographical limitations. The correlation between these globally imagined possibilities and multinational corporations becomes quite evident in light of advertisers’ aims of presenting realities to which audiences aspire. Then not only do capitalistic government policies expect boot-strap success of their citizens, but they also favor the interests of multinational corporations that exploit the mythologies of individualism.